Bakhtin and his Legacy

"Quests for my own word are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself," writes Mikhail Bakhtin towards the end of his life. It was this ceaseless pursuit of another word that allowed Bakhtin, one of the most distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, to author several influential literary theory concepts, many of which deal with the ideas of multiplicity, diversity and unfinalizability. The seminar explores these core concepts through close reading of key texts in English and investigates their reverberations in the writings of other thinkers such as Kristeva, de Man and Derrida